ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 31 AUGUST, 2022
The years of relentless, self-financed touring through Europe had finally led to the pinnacle moment for Melbourne rockers Dead City Ruins. Years of road work, opening for anyone who’d have them – Mastodon, Orange Goblin, Faster Pussycat, months on tour with Ugly Kid Joe and Skid Row in 2013/4 – had paid off as the band walked out in front of their biggest crowd ever to warm up the stage for Kiss in Melbourne.
“It was like a dream that I didn’t know I could have, came true,” recalls vocalist Steve Welsh, still in awe three days later. “Walking out onto that stage was next level. There really is no comparison. I’m struggling to find the words to describe an experience like that, and I feel that we did a really good job. I’m really happy with what we managed to pull together.”
Opening for a massive attraction on a stadium tour is a daunting and challenging encounter for any band. Even relatively well-known and well-experienced acts can be maligned or overlooked by an audience that is almost entirely invested in only the headliner. Few people talk about (or even remember) Kyuss opening for Metallica in 1993 or Rival Sons supporting Black Sabbath’s final Australian tour. Few people care who gets to play for twenty minutes at the start of the night to make sure the PA is working properly. Yet Dead City Ruins seem to have made quite an impression in front of one of the most parochial crowds in rock history.
“I managed to grab a chat with Tommy Thayer after the show,” Welsh says. “Unfortunately, they were doing signings while we were on, but he said he was sorry he missed us because all the crew told him how well we did warming the crowd up for them. Different members of the sound crew came to us after we played to tell us how great a show it was, so that’s just the best.”
Traditionally, openers don’t have much room to work with, and Dead City Ruins had to cram their high-energy show into a tiny square at the front of the stage, but the feedback from Kiss’ crowd gives Welsh the confidence that his band pulled it off well.
“We really put in a lot of effort to bring the best show we possibly could, take up as much space as humanly possible, where we could hear ourselves. There’s only a small sound sphere on stage where you really know what’s going on. When I started to walk left or right, it started to fade away, so with what we had, we made it work.”
Space to work with is something that Welsh was given when it came to writing for the band’s new album. Coming in as the replacement for founding member Jake Wiffen less than a year after the release of 2018’s Never Say Die, Welsh barely had time to find his feet out the front of Dead City Ruins before the pandemic shut down all touring and attention turned instead to new songs.
“I feel like it’s a good hybrid of DCR DNA and newer sounds.”
Steve Welsh
“They gave me all the space I needed, and all the floor space to bring ideas to the table,” he says and, reflecting the thoughts of those who have so far heard the results, adds, “I feel like it’s a good hybrid of DCR DNA and newer sounds.”
As someone who had made a small name for himself recording cover songs for YouTube as a creative outlet, Welsh was able to supply the band with their own area to work in new tunes. It was a real boon during Melbourne’s extended lockdowns when rehearsal rooms and studios were forced into closure.
“My background is that I make a lot of music at home and I have a lot of recording gear, so I had the benefit of thinking of ideas, recording them and then sending them to the boys and asking what they thought,” the singer explains. “A lot of the time, Blanch and Tommy would come over to my place and just go into my studio for hours at a time, think of riffs and put everything together. Sometimes it was all of us sitting in a room, sometimes it was just me, or just me and Blanch. Spiders I wrote almost in its entirety. Blanch and I wrote Rain together, and we all sat down in the room for Preacher. We feel that was such a great representation of all of us that we put it at number one [on the album].”
He’s quick to point out that even Spiders benefited from input from other members of the band.
“While I say I wrote most of that song myself, Blanch wrote the middle riff. He brought that into the mix, and I didn’t write the drums, so while I say that, there are elements that everyone brought into it which make the whole cake.”
Shockwave was preceded by a trio of singles, the clip for one of which, Speed Machine, features the classic Australian muscle car featured in recent publicity shots. Welsh is the proud owner of a similar machine, but not the beast from the video. That was loaned to them for the shoot after the director stumbled upon it at the back of a mechanic’s shop.
“I said I don’t want an Interceptor, because that was [Mad] Max’ car. But if I can get a matte black Falcon coupe – two-door, hardtop, whatever you want to call it – that would be the dream car. We’ve got a bunch of red ones, and I’ve got an XA sedan which is blue but it didn’t quite fit the bill. So Rick was going to get some car parts one day and happened to find this couple parked away in the back of this mechanic’s shop. Rick asked him if he wanted to have his car in our clip and the guy – his name is Stu – was so keen that he took days off to make sure he was there for us, let me take the keys to his pride and joy, and I would say that he’s now one of my best mates. He just built my 351 for my XA. So that’s how that came about.”
Opening for Kiss on home turf, touring the globe, making world-class hard rock albums, getting to hoon around in someone else’s street machine. It’s all in a day’s work for Steve Welsh and Dead City Ruins.
